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Friday, October 17, 2003

To disinvest or not to disinvest

Kaushik talked about disinvestment a few days back. I have a question, why is Ram Naik so opposed to disinvestment?

The standard answer is minister's oppose privatization because they want to protect their turf/ milk the PSUs for personal gain. Perhaps...

But if that is the case, then there should plenty of moolah involved for the party and Ram Naik himself. As far I know no one has so far suggested that Ram Naik is on the take (you are welcome to correct me).

Ram Naik is taking a lot of political risk opposing privatization. Both his bosses (Vajpayee and Advani), the chattering classes, the financial markets and a determined minister are gunning for him now. Add it all up and it is a pretty strong lobby. Please don't tell me he is risking so much just to use the HPCL guest house in Bombay.

But then again never under estimate the power of pettiness!

Ram Naik represents North Mumbai Lok Sabha. He has a track record of getting elected successively five times.

Perhaps he needs HPCL/ BPCL to dole out jobs and sundry favours for his constituents?

I really dunno, but I'm sure we'll get back to the disinvestment debate. Watch this space.

BTW, here is a tit-bit (pun not intended), as private member Ram Naik introduced a Bill for "Promotion of Breast feeding and Ban on advertisement of Baby Foods". The Bill was subsequently adopted by the Government and became an Act.

Emerging Economies

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Claus and Edward's "Baker's Dozen"

Claus Vistesen and Edward Hugh are proud and happy to announce that they are now working as "featured analysts" with a new Boston-based start-up - Emerginvest.

Claus and Edward have used a new, updated, methodology in order to identify a group of 13 emerging economies which we consider are going to outperform both the rest of the emerging economy group and the OECD economies in terms of a number of key performance indicators over the 2008 - 2020 horizon.

Through our association with Emerginvest we hope to develop performance indicators which will confirm both the relevance and validity of the selection procedure adopted.

We would like to point out that we have absolutely no financial connection whatsoever with Emerginvest - although we do heartily endorse what they are trying to do.

In particular we see the move by the investment community towards emerging markets as one of the most effective and direct ways to address those issues of inter-country wealth and income imbalances which have plagued our planet for so long now - namely by getting the money from the rich who have it to the poor who need it.

Sending investment to emerging economies is also a way of addressing the underlying imbalances which exist between the relatively older populations of the developed economies who increasingly need to save, and the relatively younger emerging economies who can benefit from the investment of those savings in their countries. So in a way you can both ensure the future of your own pension and help attack poverty at one and the same time. This type of possibility is normally known in economics as "win-win".

The oldest known source and most probable origin for the expression "baker's dozen" dates to the 13th century in one of the earliest English statutes, instituted during the reign of Henry III (r. 1216-1272), called the Assize of Bread and Ale. Bakers who were found to have shortchanged customers could be liable to severe punishment. To guard against the punishment of losing a hand to an axe, a baker would give 13 for the price of 12, to be certain of not being known as a cheat. Specifically, the practice of baking 13 items for an intended dozen was to prevent "short measure", on the basis that one of the 13 could be lost, eaten, burnt or ruined in some way, leaving the baker with the original dozen.

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About Claus

Claus Vistesen is a 23 year old macroeconomist who is on the point of finishing his MSc in Applied Economics and Finance from the Copenhagen Business School. His primary research interests are international finance and international macroeconomics. Claus is especially interested in how the changing structure of global and national demographics impacts on local macroeconomic performance. Moreover - and as the wonk he ultimately is - he also takes a considerable interest issues and methodologies associated with econometrics, and this is an interest he intends to develop in his postgraduate research.

About Edward

Edward 'the bonobo' is a Catalan macroeconomist and economic demographer of British extraction, now based in Barcelona. By inclination he is a macroeconomist, but his deep-seated obsession with trying to understand the economic impact of contemporary demographic changes has often taken him far from home, off and away from the more tranquil and placid pastures of the dismal science, into the bracken and thicket of demography, anthropology, biology, sociology and systems theory. All of which has lead him to ask himself whether Thomas Wolfe was not in fact right when he asserted that the fact of the matter is "you can never go home again".

He is currently working on a book with the provisional working title "Population, the Ultimate Non-renewable Resource".